


Memories

by theyalwayssay



Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Gen, Les Misérables References, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:17:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyalwayssay/pseuds/theyalwayssay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Returning home from recent tragedy, Hamish Watson-Holmes finds a very strange woman at the docks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories

A memory. That was, alas, all she was to him now, thought Hamish Holmes, watching the horizon of his native England grow ever larger while he felt himself as though his own self was diminishing.

It was strange to feel such grief for a person that he had never spoken to much in her lifetime. However, that was just what he was grieving; all the lost moments that, now she was dead, had passed into useless oblivion. Never again would his father receive a letter from her. Never would he see that dark blue wax seal that would announce her spouting of opinions that her father did not wish to hear. And now he had been forced to bury her. Hamish now understood the oft-broken rule that parents should never be forced to bury their progeny.

Beatrix Adler-Holmes had been a strong woman, stronger indeed than those had wished her to be. As the daughter of a British ambassador sent to speak with a fellow occupying a high seat in the American government, she had been implored to behave as one of such elected nobility should. However, it was not in her nature to heed such advice, rather to emulate the opposite. A bar fight. Even with her history, Hamish would have put it past her to stoop so low. The cut had been quick and clean, a simple knife to the throat. She didn’t even spill any blood on her dress.

Hamish stepped off the boat and walked steadily down the long wooden pier, the boats docked listing slightly from one side to another like tipsy men walking home after two days gone, the grey clouds like a thick mist of sewer water, hanging limp as an old rag from celestial clotheslines. He pulled his top hat closer down over his brow as he walked quickly thought the damp air.

He was greeted at the end of the dock with the usual cluster of painted china dolls, dressed in dingy lace and silk that appeared to have been dragged through the rough brine of the salt-crusty sea. These crusted and rusted porcelain figures, so ready to break their fragile and oft-patched up limbs, would crowd around the fishermen and merchants, begging to be picked up and played with for a paltry sum needed to keep the joints moving and the little glass hearts beating.

He walked through the crowd, his eyes downcast as wandering fingers plucked at his coat sleeves, faint calls of “Sir, Monsieur, Herr, meneer,” following him as he went. From the cold grey stone buildings that houses inns and fishing houses, more painted shadows loomed in the doorways, rag figures slumped in the doorways, legs and crushed velvet bosoms embroidered with more flowers than the seaside boasted propped up like meat at market.

“Monsieur, pourquoi ne pas les acheter?” Hamish looked around at the foreign tongue to see a girl slumped on the stone step outside the briny wooden door of the Blue Man Inn. She was not propped up like the others as though she was on display, but as though she had been tossed from the heavens and landed with her limbs and joints jostled by the hard ground, her legs splayed out before her in her worn brown boots and tattered grey woolen tights. Her pale face peered out from piles of curly dark hair, and she wore a corset and skirt embroidered with interlocking spirals that looked as though they had once been dark blue but had since turned a brackish green from years of wear, patches of velvet missing like mange on a feral dog. As she looked up at the young man before her, a retching cough shook her thin frame. “Sir,” she said, breathing deeply as her hacking subsided, “why are you not buying? Are the women not suitable for you?”

“I am currently not in the market for prostitutes,” Hamish said, looking down at the young woman seated before him. Perhaps it was something in her face, something in those eyes as dark as the sky overhead, that made him think as though she had been seen by him before…

“Are you married, sir?” she asked, pushing a particularly thick curl out of her eyes. “It doesn’t appear that you are, unless you had to sell your ring. But you seem too well-off to be forced to sell a possession. You are from England, yes?”

"Herr, wie viel Sie für mich bezahlen?" called a woman behind Hamish, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist, her orange hair braided up like fisherman’s rope and her face smeared with paint as red as blood. He could feel the strings of her corset press against his spine. “Ten pound, ten pound!”

"Sara, geh weg! Der Mann ist nicht für dich!" Called the young woman in blue, and the orange-haired prostitute scurried away.

“Please forgive her,” the young woman in blue said, “We are all desperate.”

“What has happened to see you all behave so?” Hamish asked. He swept his coat around and sat down beside the woman. “And might I ask who you are, who can speak so fluently in so many different tongues?”

“My name is Amelia,” the woman said after a moment’s pause, her eyes turned to the sky. “I am a child of everywhere. My father was a traveler, and my mother birthed me in the middle of the ocean on a tiny blue boat, where different lands stop and there is only water, water and life and nothing else. I grew up on that little boat, my childhood spent in a great, blue, open space. My father was reckless, and often it was my mother who saved him from death so many a time. But my mother died eventually, as mothers are wont to do, giving birth to what would have been my sister. We lost them both, and my father had to let the waves take them into their embrace.

“I traveled with my father for years, learning and growing and changing, but he had become old and tired in his adventures. My father was an unusual sort. He had grown up odd as a child, and thought himself to be immortal. He believed that when his soul grew tired of one body, his would lose his memory and name and become a completely different man, starting over again at age twenty or forty or thirty-five. I was on the deck of the little boat the morning he changed. He walked out, dressed in fine clothes that I didn’t know he possessed, and he shouted at me that I was not to be on his boat, that he sailed it alone and he didn’t want a thief or a prostitute on his ship. I tried to tell him that I was neither, that I was his flesh and blood and daughter, but he kept saying ‘No, no, you cannot be, I have neither wife nor child, and he shall not attempt to lie to me, wretch.’ He dropped me off here the next day, and then sailed away. I never saw him again, and he never remembered me. I was only a shadow of a memory to him, and event that never was. To this day, I do not believe he remembers his family.”

She looked over at Hamish, who stared at her with wide eyes. “I am…I am so sorry to hear that,” he said quietly.

“It is only in the past now,” Amelia said, nodding. “Naturally, this was the only work I was able to get, being an orphaned girl. But even the job of prostitution has left me without a single pound to my name.”

“How can that be? I was under the impression that it was possible for anyone to make money in a business like this?”

“When whoring out yourself to others, sir, there does have to be a market of men who wish for you to whore yourself out to them. The market is different for every wretch at this pier. Some have men who are willing to wait day and night for a chance to buy her, and then there are others who are lucky to see three men a day. I am not even that lucky. I have been working in this job for five years, and I’ve never had an offer. Not one in all my years. There is nothing more useless than a woman who is unable to be a prostitute because no man would ever want her.” she laughed quietly. “For the life of me, I do not know why I’m telling you this. Forgive me for troubling you with the stories of a useless soul.”

“These stories do trouble me, yes,” Hamish agreed. “But they trouble me because you are, out of all the woman here, the only one who I could see. The rest pass back and forth like painted dolls, but you are the only one who I truly see. I feel as though I have met you before.”

Amelia shook her head. “I would have remembered, sir,” she replied. “You are the only man besides the innkeeper who has conversed with me in five years. I would never be able to forget your face.” she looked up at him, and her face shone through that dark hair like the moon. “A wonderful man like you, to appear like something out of a dream. I haven’t introduced myself to anyone new in so long. And of course it would only happen at the end.”

“The end of what?” Hamish asked.

“The end of days. My days. I am going to die soon,” Amelia said, looking down at the cobblestones slick with seawater and the tears of the desperate. “I have been infected with a disease brought from America, a disease that has affected my lungs and has made them grow weaker. Even at this point, I find it nearly impossible to breathe. I suppose it is well and good that no man would want me now, for I feel I would not have the strength to do that which he has paid for.”

“No,” Hamish said quietly. A light mist had begun to fall on their perch in front of their stoop, and the water droplets clung to Amelia’s think hair like pearls trapped in seaweed, and in that moment he knew…in that moment he remembered.

“My father worked as a detective,” Hamish said. Amelia looked around to stare at him, her eyes glinting like waves. “His work took him all over, crisscrossing into different countries, and he would bring me with him. He had an assistant once, an old doctor who worked in the trenches in the last war, but he had since died. My father said that he always needed an extra pair of eyes at his disposal, eyes that could see things that he might have missed, hear things he could not. I was able to see things that others didn’t, but most of the things I saw I kept quiet about. My father was able to solve the crimes without my extra knowledge, and the information I had were like treasures to me, meant to be hoarded and kept a secret for my mind only.

“I was on a barge with my father when I was about twelve, far off in international waters where a man had been stabbed on his way to Spain. My father was called out to dispense justice, and on the boat, I was standing on the edge of the deck, and I saw…I thought I saw…I was a child of little imagination, reading works on science and not faery tales, but I thought it was a mermaid, a creature of the sea that the old army doctor had once told me about. He said that they were great and powerful creatures that could live their entire lives in the ocean, with long hair woven with seaweed and eyes like the ocean. That young girl I saw, swimming in the ocean…that was you, was it not? Your hair, hair that almost blends in with the seagrass…I know it so well.”

The misty rain clung to the girls’ face, making her tears almost invisible if not for her red eyes. “Off the coast of Spain,” she said quietly. “That was the day before my father forgot me and changed everything. That was two days before he left me here.”

“You’ve been prostituting yourself since you were twelve?” Hamish asked, aghast.

“I had no choice! My father left me no money, and it was impossible for me to get a job with my limited skills. I am a child of knowledge and of intellect, an aspect which is not prized in this community. I was merely another street urchin, not worthy of pity. I am seventeen now. I will not see the sunrise of my eighteenth year.”

“But…but I have only just found you. Your image has haunted me for years, the girl living in the ocean. I cannot see you disappear from me now.”

“Sir,” she said, shaking her head. “It must be. I have done all I can for myself. There is nothing left to do.”

“Allow me to take you to my home. You can stay there, and be fed and kept in the warmth until you are well again.”

“There is no point in that. This has been my home for five years. I shall not abandon it now. I am not like my father. I do not wish to travel as he did. When I was younger, I wished to see the world as he did, and look at what happened to him. I do not want to become mad. The universe is too beautiful to be kept away from it. Leave me here.”

“I can’t.”

“You must. I am not worth it. Forgive me for ruining your fantasies. I am not a mermaid, or a creature of fantasy. I am only a sad, withered girl who was forced to become a woman too fast. I apologize for the inconvenience. You must be quite cold now.”

Hamish looked down at the girl, the sad lonely girl that he had only seen once in his life, but had shaken him to the core, made him believe that there were things in the world that could not be explained, and creatures that humans had no knowledge of and would never reveal themselves. She had led him to believe in impossible things. But here she sat, a rejected prostitute, and harshly and repugnantly real.

Hamish quickly shed his coat and placed it around her shoulders. “What are you-” she asked, but he was already pulling an old brass watch out of his pocket and a 100 pound note.

“You gave hope in impossible things to a little boy whose father preferred to spend time with corpses than with him,” he said, placing the objects gently into her lap. “You gave me hope. That is worth more than anything else. Thank you.”

And without another word, he strode off through the dark alleyways, the misty rain staining his white shirt with pinpricks of wetness.

Amelia looked down at the objects in her lap and sighed. They were too real to be of any use. But he had given them of him own free will. It was kind, and noble. What strange things to exist. “Thank you, sir,” she said quietly, bending her thin frame deeper into the long coat, her damp hair leaving dark stains upon the collar.

A week later, as the hearse was driven down the pier and the plain wooden coffin, the least expensive that could be bought, was carried out by the cheaply-paid pallbearers, Hamish realized that he had never told Amelia his name.

**Author's Note:**

> ~The girl mentioned in the beginning, Beatrix, is an original character created for another fic as the daughter of Mycroft Holmes and Irene Adler and used here purely as a plot device.


End file.
